Obsidian Dumar III, world weary, Pulitzer Prize winning author, a professor of literature at Brown in Providence, RI is stuck. After instant success with his first book his publisher asked him to write a memoir. Like many an author before him he is finding it extremely difficult to write about himself. To tell his own story requires reliving painful memories he'd long ago consigned to his private dustbin. Except as he ponders more about his life resurrecting events, images from his past, there have always been seemingly dark forces at play surrounding Dr. Dumar from a very young age.

Then the letter arrives from Lula Mae Sykes. A person who says they are related and his grandfather Obsidian Dumar has died and left him to be the caretaker of the family secret. It is this letter which sets him on his epic journey through time, space and culture. He follows clue after clue contained in bits ‘n pieces of his grandfather’s “autobiography.”